A collection of interests, inspirations, ideas, opinions and outcomes.

Crimes Against Design – Briefing Task

I have just finished being briefed on my new project and am looking forward to quite an exciting term, not only is this project different in the sense that we are working in groups but it is also free to interpretation and outcome. I also like this controversial idea of good and bad design.

Our brief is to explore and analyse a specific location in search for was is good and bad design and most of all what is a crime against design? Before we were given the location we were asked to give examples of what we think bad design is.

It is easy to say what is bad when you are looking right at it however thinking of bad design from the top of your head. However I could think of a lot of my favourite designs, for example the clever use of an arrow in the Amazon amd FedEx logos. The Amazon logo is less subtle but many people don’t see the message, the arrow points from the A to the Z inferring that Amazon includes everything you could possible need. Literally everything from A to Z. FedEx had a hidden arrow between the E and the X which a lot of people miss out this infers the idea of spees, process and delivery. However clever these logos are many people have not noticed the little details.

We also spoke about the confusion that name changing a brand can cause, most of the time these name changes are due to legal rights however this is still annoying for loyal customers who may not be certain of the name change. The examples both have the same results and reasons “Bounty” paper towels and “Charmin” , both of these had the same treatment. “Bounty” was originally owned by Proctor and Gamble then sold to Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA). According to Which (2009) SCA had decided to rebrand “Bounty” now to “Plenty”, using a £8m advertising campaign starring the popular stars of the previous “Bounty” campaign Brenda and Audrey to tell the audience the change.

The toilet paper “Charmin” was also bought by SCA from Proctor and Gamble now called “Cushelle”. There are no online sources explaining why these changes took place, also these changes have only took place within Europe where SCA owns the brand. According to Anne Cassidy (2010) SCA said that Cushelle was chose because of the softness of the word to represent the soft tissues.

I disagree with these statements for one reason, sustainability. SCA describes themselves as “the business of creating value for people and nature”. With that in mind the brand names “Bounty” and “Charmin” we’re not following a sustainable approach and possibly were made harming the environment. With the name upholding a bad reputation the sustainable company would want to deliberately change it to start a new chapter. (SCA, 2014)

However some re-branding works better than others. Greggs currently is in the process of changing their colour scheme from the insence blue and orange to neutral browns. In our opinion s we thought the neutral colours are an improvement, they express more of a traditional home made feel rather than a fast food chain.

Over all we noticed how hard it was to talk about bad design without seeing it in the moment. We mainly thought of indipendant shops had the worst design. This probably is because they can’t afford to have a graphic designer create identity and have to resort to designing it themselves or paying the minimum for their designs.